The Fullness of Earthly Bliss

Marcus and Tvorceskiy are on the run from a group they refer to only as the Viennese. They are psychics who worked for Vienna and are now working to bring it down, if they can only stop long enough to realise that they are changing more than just their appearance as they run.

"The departure lounge of Venice Airport was designed with little consideration for any of the town's famous and beautiful architecture. Departure lounges the world over were exactly the same. All white concrete and glass, with hard blue plastic chairs and screaming children and the strange stink of travelling despair. Perhaps it was body odour, jet fuel or long over-percolated coffee. Perhaps it was just his own exhaustion.

Marcus had thought that he loved airports but he had moved from departure lounge to departure lounge for the last six months with occasional stops in cheap nameless hotels, in hostels once in a while, and his opinion had changed. The reality of staying on a train from Paris to Moscow had not lived up to the fantasy and there had been no time to stay in Moscow, to appreciate the scenery, the wonder of travel, just enough to pick up a cheap bottle of vodka from a street vendor, two cups of borscht, drunk laced with the raw vodka and then on the metro to the airport and out, half way to Hong-Kong before they had even stamped his new EU passport.

What surprised him most, because he had thought that he had loved travel, was how very nutritious airline food could pretend to be. There was no flavour to it, that had been steamed out of it, very little colour remained and even watching Tvorceskiy chasing the beans around the plastic tray with a little plastic fork had grown old.

Marcus made the same jokes about the mile high club on this night flight that he made every time, on every flight. Tvorceskiy looked at him for a long moment before he pulled the air-line blanket that he had wedged in the pocket in the forward chair, and then ripped it open with his teeth, much as one would open a condom.

Lie on your side he said, and Marcus twisted in the slim, uncomfortable chair, his long legs getting in the way but knowing Tvorceskiy's intent as he pillowed his head on Tvorceskiy's shoulder and Tvorceskiy draped the blanket over him.

Tvorceskiy's hand was hot and dry, the skin turned almost to sandpaper from repeated and prolonged travel, but it was sure and it knew what it was doing. A quick jerk released the buttons on his Levis and strong fingers were inside with skin like an old chamois left in the sun and hard bitten nails. Tvorceskiy was perfunctory, he knew Marcus's responses like he knew his own, and the added danger, the people snoring around them in cattle class, even the smell of detergent in Tvorceskiy's stolen hooded sweatshirt just made it that little bit better, that little bit hotter. He could smell the strange peppered chicken on Tvorceskiy's breath, bent over, resting his head on Marcus's as if they had fallen asleep in this position.

Tvorceskiy's palm was dry and his fingers loose as they slipped back and forth along Marcus's cock, his nails catching in fire bright pubic hair and remarkably dexterous despite the position and his still mostly closed jeans, his hand just inside the open fly. His palm rubbed and pulled and it took all Marcus had to not move into that hand, to murmur because it had been so long, and that had been a quick fumble in a cheap by-the-hour hotel in a suburb of Paris. Tvorceskiy straining above him in the street light that came through the window and his eyes boring into him like diamond drills.

The danger, the silence, Tvorceskiy's apparent inattention and the memory of that night in the 14th arrondissement and the scratch of Tvorceskiy's bitten nails, once so carefully manicured, was enough to bring Marcus to climax, burying his face in the scarlet coloured sweat fabric of Tvorceskiy's shoulder. Don't you dare drool, Tvorceskiy warned and Marcus, boneless, tired, satisfied, just smiled.
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